How We Score Corruption Risk
How we confirm each bill, quote its official text, and label what we do not know.
Five signs, 0–20 points eachEvery quote checked against the official textA score is not an accusation
The five signs of corruption risk
Each sign looks at how the bill is written, not at anyone's intent. The total is out of 100.
- Targeted private benefitsMoney, rights, relief or advantages aimed at a named or narrowly defined private recipient.
- Competition restrictionsSole-source awards, licensing barriers, exclusive rights or rules that shut out rivals.
- Opaque allocationFunds or benefits handed out by discretion, without published criteria, competition or reporting.
- Oversight removalLimits on audits, inspectors general, courts, review or other independent checks.
- Disclosure exemptionsExemptions from FOIA, reporting, publication or record-keeping, or required deletion of records.
How points are given
The same scale for every sign. Scoring needs context and counterevidence; these anchors do not mechanically prove corruption.
- 0No supported mechanism in this text version.
- 1–5An indirect or broadly shared benefit.
- 6–10An explicit but bounded restriction.
- 11–15A concentrated mechanism with weak safeguards.
- 16–20A concentrated mechanism with safeguards explicitly removed.
A 0 means no supported risk for that sign in the reviewed text version. It does not prove the bill is clean. A bill with no review, or with too little evidence, has no total score.
What every review records
- Text version and hash
- Section
- Exact quote
- Mechanism
- Counterevidence
- Confidence
- Review date
- Limitations
Only reviews that use this rubric are ranked against each other. The bill health, policy impact and AI risk scores are separate. A review of how a bill is written does not establish a person's intent or criminal conduct.
Who writes a review
Both kinds are interpretations grounded in the official text, not official government findings.
Reviewed by a person
Someone reads the official text and writes the review by hand. A hand-written review always replaces an automated one.
✦ AI review
Gemini reads the complete official text of a federal bill that a signed-in reader tracks or asks to check. A daily limit caps these runs. Code then rejects the review unless:
- every quote appears word for word in that text,
- the text version hash matches,
- the total equals its five signs.
It is labeled “AI review”. A person has not checked it.
When the official text changes, the review no longer applies, and a tracked bill is checked again.
Which bill, and what stage
One bill, one legislative identity
Federal identity includes Congress, bill type and number. State identity includes jurisdiction, session and the source's persistent identifier. Bill numbers repeat across sessions. Official titles and text versions must agree before a review can be attached.
What is “coming up”?
Pending bills belong to the current Congress or a source-confirmed open state session and have not reached a final outcome. Passage in one chamber is still pending. Enacted, signed and chaptered measures are in the enacted view. Failed, withdrawn, vetoed and closed-session proposals are historical. Completed simple resolutions are historical measures, not laws.
The latest action is not a prediction. A future hearing, vote or deadline needs a dated official calendar; when there is none, VoteImpact says so.
Coverage, sources and agent access
The catalog imports official federal records and discovers state bills through OpenStates. State records stay unverified until they are checked against the legislature. Imports resume after restarts and provider pauses. Federal enrichment adds official details, Congressional Research Service summaries and available text, and calls no paid AI model.
Imported records, enriched records, finished reviews and pages that search engines may index are counted separately. A page needs real source content before it enters the sitemap, and submitting a sitemap does not guarantee Google indexes it.
A score reads how a bill is written. It is not a finding of corruption, a crime or anyone's intent.